The present invention relates to management of virtual machines (VMs), and more specifically, to methods and algorithms for optimizing VM allocations.
A contemporary virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a machine (i.e., a computer) that executes programs like a physical machine. The VM typically emulates a physical computing environment, but requests for central processing unit (CPU), memory, hard disk, network and other hardware resources are managed by a virtualization layer which translates these requests to the underlying physical hardware. VMs are created within a virtualization layer, such as a hypervisor or a virtualization platform that runs on top of a client or server operating system. The virtualization layer is typically used to create many individual, isolated VMs within a single, physical machine. Multiple VMs are typically used in server consolidation, where different services that were previously run on individual machines are instead run in isolated VMs on the same physical machine.
A persistent challenge to providers of cloud hosting and other network management services is the efficient use of system resources. Efficient allocation of VMs to different network nodes, e.g., network servers, is desired in order to maximize the use of network resources and reduce the number of physical servers and/or physical resources required to provide computing services to customers.